How to Read Your Voicemails in iOS 10

Here is a guide on how to read your voicemails in iOS 10 on the iPhone.

The free iOS 10 update delivers tons of great new features available for your iPhone. One of the new features available on newer iPhones (7, 6s, SE and Newer) is Voicemail transcription.

Voicemail Transcription can be a very useful tool if you are out and about and potentially aren’t able to listen to the voicemail you just received. Apple will attempt to transcribe what you got in your voicemail box so that you can screen your calls even if you’ve missed them.

How to Read Your Voicemails in iOS 10

Here are the steps to take to be able to read your voicemails on your iOS 10 iPhone.

Watch the video above for how to read your voicemails in the new iOS.

Reading Voicemails

When your iPhone is updated to iOS 10, you should be able to start using the new transcription feature right away. When someone leaves you a voicemail, the iPhone will take a few moments to recognize and process the words spoken. Accessing your voicemail Tab in the Phone app will show you your visual voicemail list and tapping a voicemail will take you to the transcription.

When it is available, you will see Transcribing… and then moments later a reasonably accurate transcription of your voicemail should be available for you to read. If you ever used Google Voice in the past, they too used a transcription service that was more often than not, accurate enough to get the point across.

You may see some incorrect words but keep in mind that it is transcribing from the usual poor phone call audio quality so it will do its best to get it as accurate as possible.

Keep in mind that this feature is only available on the newer iPhone devices starting with the 6s generation up to the current 7 and the iPhone SE. Previous generation phones do not support this feature at this time.

Transcribing voicemails is a great feature to have especially if you receive a call during a work meeting or another event where you may be able to steal a glance at your phone yet not answer. Hopefully as time goes on and more users utilize this feature, the transcription abilities will keep improving until we are getting word for word text from our voicemails.